Chosen (7 page)

“W
ho was that, baby?” Penny tries to climb onto Jason’s lap. Their baby twists inside as she tries to get comfortable. Jason elbows her off him; he’s mad. She lands on her hip on the dirty orange shag carpet. “Ow!”

“You’re too heavy. Jesus.” He gets up off the sofa, paces the tiny room. His jacket jingles, his angry walk, a sound that makes her want to hide behind the sofa or strip off her black sweatpants and lie down for him.

But she gets up and crosses, one eye on him, to the bassinet in the corner. She folds, refolds, the two tiny blankets from Julio’s wife, nice straight creases. She sits the green bunny rabbit up a little straighter. Soon, baby, soon, she thinks.

Jason jingles over to her. “Just getting things worked out for us.”

“But we’re still…” She is afraid to say it, when he’s like this. He’d promised he would take care of her, take care of things.

“What?” He spins, narrowing his eyes at her. God, she hates how he knows he can scare her. He knows what got done to her outside Denver. For the first time since those freeloaders showed up, she wishes Lisle and Brandi were home.

“I just mean,” she says as she hooks her fingers in the front loops of his jeans, trying to rub on him, but her stomach’s in the way. Penny
looks down between them. If she leans forward she can see her white feet. They look wider than they are long, like boiled potatoes, her toes tiny sausages, straining against the skin. “I just mean, nothing’s changed about Buddy, right?”

“Jesus, Penny.” Jason sighs, rubbing his chin hard into the top of her forehead where her hair is coming back in bristly. “What do we want with a baby right now?” He is pushing her on the shoulder, digging his fingers into her shoulder bone, and she stumbles to her knees. This she can do. “What do we need with a baby?” He keeps one hand on her shoulder as he unzips his dirty jeans with the other. “You’re my baby. I don’t need no other babies.” And he lets go of her shoulder, moves his rough hand to cup under her jaw, the calluses scraping her cheek, brings it around to the top of her head, holding her there. “That’s right,” he grunts softly, “you’re my baby.”

Okay, Penny thinks, gagging a little, okay, then.

Just so long as nothing’s changed.

“P
ush, honey, PUSH!”

Poor sweetie has been pushing for the last two hours, two hours where she both shit and peed on the bed, two hours where they heard the nurses remarking over her incredible hemorrhoids at the shift change, but the worst of all, two hours where she has been unable to push the baby out.

Nineteen hours of labor and now in the homestretch, the baby’s heart rate dipping with each contraction, seconds away from an emergency C-section, and with all of her glorious might, when Dr. Woo gives his final nod, Eva roars to life and pushes her son out.

“Darling!” Paul has never called her this before, he realizes, as he watches the doctor lift the baby, covered in blood and smears of blackish green, onto Eva’s soft belly.

The baby is Wyeth Edward Nova, named after Eva’s favorite painter, her father, and Paul’s family name.

“Six pounds twelve ounces, honey! All fingers and toes accounted for, whoa, and a whopper of a willy!”

Paul already has his finger in his son’s fist; he marvels at the baby’s strength. Then the nurse takes over, handling him too roughly, Paul thinks, and then she is plopping him right in Paul’s arms, and he is struck by how important this moment is. The first time in eleven
years, since his mother, brother, and father died within ten months of each other, that Paul has had skin-to-skin contact with an immediate blood relative.

When his eyes meet Eva’s, they are slick with tears, and he says quietly so that only she can hear, “This has been a long time coming.”

Paul moves close enough so they can both touch him, marveling.

I
T TAKES THE DOCTOR
almost forty minutes to stitch up Eva. Paul passes the foot of the bed, and like driving past a car accident, can’t stop himself from glimpsing the carnage. It will be a long time before he will be able to prepare red meat, pat raw ground beef between his palms to make hamburger patties.

Wyeth is exactly one hour old, Paul notes, realizing that after watching the clock obsessively for the past few hours, he has been inattentive. Its familiar white face with black hands ticks back at him like an old friend. On the bed, Eva has the baby in her arms, her gown open, Wyeth alternately suckling and sleeping. Paul is amazed at how their room feels different now, drained of adrenaline, their edgy exhaustion replaced with a serene sleepiness. The nurse has efficiently turned the place from a delivery area to a mid-range hotel room. When Dr. Woo has finished with his wife—“Twenty-two stitches, sweetheart,” he says, patting her knee as he leaves. “Don’t be shy about asking for painkillers, okay?”—all traces of blood leave with him.

“I can turn the lights down, if you like?” the nurse offers, and Paul realizes they are really going to leave them alone with this baby. He looks to Eva, panic juicing his heart rate, but she doesn’t return it. She is blinking, long, slow blinks, her head bent over Wyeth.

“Okay, that would be nice,” she mumbles, and her eyes close before the nurse has even shut the door. Paul looks at her, his son at her breast, her hair a tangled mass behind her on the pillow, the blood vessels in her cheeks and eyes broken from the pushing. During the last hour of labor, she had complained of itching, scratched deep
raspberry-colored welts into her neck and chest—it looks like she has been lashed. Paul runs his hand lovingly over her forehead, leans closer to examine his son, his tiny throat moving like a tree frog’s, in and out, frantically sucking, eyes closed, then resting, perfect nostrils flaring.

“Nice job,” Paul whispers. “Both of you.”

Eva makes a noise, her eyes closed.

“I’m going to step out, make some calls.” Paul stands, stretches his arms up over his head, cracks his neck twice, goes out to the hallway. His phone is clipped to his belt; he flips it to check the time—4:36 a.m. There’s nobody he can call. His aunt, his closest relative, wouldn’t mind, he knows, but there’s no point in waking her. Good news can wait.

The calls that wake you from sleep are those that can’t. Paul remembers his first middle-of-the-night call. His mother, a lifetime smoker and diabetic, was in the hospital for a routine operation for an infection on her leg, a gardening cut gone purple. Paul was a handful of weeks from high school graduation, sleeping over at a friend’s, planning a night of Boone’s Farm wine and girl-chasing, when his father called.

“The doc says it must have been a blood clot,” Paul’s father choked. “Somehow got dislodged. They couldn’t get her back.”

Two months later, the men of the family stumbled around in their grief, weeks of pizza, fried egg sandwiches, and ramen noodles, until Paul Sr. sat him down in the kitchen that held the smell of cooking grease and told him, “I’m making Ritchie a partner in the business.” It was the summer after Paul graduated from high school, all warm breezes from the gorge, clear sunshine and strangeness, the silence of their house in the mornings. Paul was working with his father full-time, and he took the news like a slap.

“Dad.”

“Paulie—” His father held up his hand, coughing.

“Dad. I’m a better worker than Ritchie. He’s never on time, he, he doesn’t even know how to pick up the goddamn voice mail, Dad!”

“Paulie—” His father coughed again, smacked his own chest with a fist. “Listen to me: you’re going to college. Ritchie is going to come on board with me, and you’re going to college.”

“Dad…” Paul faltered.
He hadn’t thought…He didn’t think…
SuperNova Electric and Sons?

“You’re too smart to be crawling around in people’s attics and basements, fishing wires your whole damn life. You’ll go to college and learn how to grow this business, get us a whole fleet of vans running around, other people doing the job for us, us
managing
the business. That’s the future of SuperNova. I’m bringing your brother into the technical part full-time, get his lazy ass working. Then I’m going to retire and make you partner in my place, okay? I’m going to move to Mexico and sip froufrou drinks all day, and you boys are going to do my dirty work, send me the checks.”

Paul had enrolled that fall at Portland State University, just across the bridge, despite worries about his father’s health, his older brother’s lack of responsibility. They sat down to dinner at night, the tabletop TV droning the news, with Paul Sr. eating less, coughing more, still smoking his Lucky Strikes. Ritchie would alternately make an effort at work, then fall back into bed for weeks, as though the weight of just doing what everyone else did on a daily basis, showing up and putting in eight hours, was too much for him.

But more than worrying about his father and brother, and his increasing anxiety that the freshman-year classes, all bullshit requirements, were doing nothing toward helping him learn to grow his father’s electrical business, Paul was being pursued by a girl, and he didn’t know what to do about that either. Eva Sunderland was the seventeen-year-old freshman who sat next to him in Introduction to Anthropology. She had waist-length, perpetually messy blond hair and wrote him funny notes in the borders of her binder, miniature
sketches of her life as depicted with the Pygmies their professor droned about.

“Exhibit A: Pygmies wading with me through beer sludge at ATO house this weekend,” she would write, and pass him a lined sheet of paper, tiny stick-figure Pygmies sailing on a plastic cup next to the chunky sole of her ubiquitous brown hiking boots. “Exhibit B: Pygmies trying to tempt me not to write this stupid paper.” And there they would be, drawn pulling her hair, holding up ads for concerts,
Gypsy Kings, 7:30
, in the newspaper. There were Pygmies that got buried in her mountains of dirty laundry, Pygmies getting her out of a really bad blind date, Pygmies flying back east with her for Thanksgiving break, angry-eyebrowed Pygmies hating to be shuffled between her newly divorced parents, and finally, somewhere around Exhibit Q, a week before Christmas break, the Pygmies were smacking their foreheads and sharpening spears in outrage that Cute Guy next to her still hadn’t asked her out.

Paul turned red, thinking again,
He hadn’t thought…He didn’t think…

So he took her home two nights before she left for Christmas break. The house was dark and quiet when they arrived, breathless from the cold. His father and brother were out pulling wires, replacing fuse boxes, avoiding getting shocked in the standing water of flooded basements, Portland’s winter rains already in full effect.

Paul and Eva sat at the scratched orange Formica table in the kitchen, the bacon scent from breakfast lingering. They drank jelly glasses of his dead mother’s peach schnapps and went up to his bedroom, which he had cleaned in advance. He wasn’t always slow to catch on. On the plaid comforter set, last year’s Christmas present from his mother, they had tentative, awkward, desperate sex. Three times.

In the morning, Eva was backed up into him, her blond hair a stormy tangle in his face, her cheek pressed against his bicep, dampness everywhere they touched.

“Hey, sweetheart.” She flipped over, so their eyes were only millimeters apart, her giant breasts pressing into his chest.

Paul, afraid he had morning breath, only smiled as widely as he could.

“So,” she said as she got dressed, “I can’t believe it took you all damn semester.” She was wearing jeans and hiking boots, nothing on top, and he wanted to pull her back into bed, one more time, but they both had an eight o’clock exam.

“So why me?” He finally asked the question he had been thinking all night, all semester.

“It’s your last name,” she told him, finger-combing her ropy hair. “I saw you on the class list and thought, Eva Nova sounds good. You’d be amazed how many names don’t go with Eva.” She pronounced it in the Swedish way, AY-vah, just the slightest hint of an accent in her voice. Paul didn’t know whether to kiss her chunky brown hiking boots or run for the hills.

W
HEN SHE FLEW BACK
from Christmas break, neither Paul Sr. nor Ritchie said anything about the peach-cheeked girl who moved things, a dryer with a bullhornlike attachment for her tangly hair, a loud fan that they thought would drown out the squeaking bedsprings, up the staircase into Paul’s narrow bedroom.

“My roommate snores,” she told Paul as she pushed his clothes to one side in his closet. Occasionally she cooked for them, simple spaghetti with jarred meat sauce, but mostly she and Paul kept to themselves, learning the basics of higher education and honing the fine skill of the elusive simultaneous orgasm.

Three weeks later, in February, when the sun hadn’t shone in eleven days and there was the thinnest veil of slippery snow coating the streets of downtown, Ritchie died.

It turned out to be a malfunction of the company vehicle, a former bread delivery truck with “SuperNova Electric” stenciled on the side, a cranky diesel engine thumping away under the floorboards. Ritchie,
who was on his way to a two-day gig in eastern Oregon, left before it was light, a gentle snow falling as he got farther from the coast, and pulled over at a rest stop for a nap off 84, near Bend. State troopers found him in the cab of the truck, early afternoon, the motor running, “probably to keep the cab warm,” they said, but something malfunctioned, and instead of warm air, the diesel engine pumped carbon monoxide fumes into the truck. Ritchie never woke up.

Three months later Paul Sr. died of lung cancer, morphined and unconscious until he let go, Paul and Eva holding his curled hands.

Paul was just twenty, Eva eighteen, when they worked together over Memorial Day weekend, packing first his mother’s, then his brother’s, and finally his father’s belongings into a U-Haul and driving them to a Salvation Army. They stopped at a Mattress Giant on the way home, and Eva bought a pillow-top king mattress set for a thousand dollars. Paul’s old bedroom became the office, Ritchie’s the rarely used guest room, and the new mattress set went on the floor under the windows in the master bedroom that looked out over the shady tomato garden in the backyard. His father’s small life insurance policy went into escrow for Paul’s tuition, because he didn’t want to have any debt. In between writing both of their papers and scheduling SuperNova clients, Eva cooked and cleaned when she could. After that, Paul noticed, the house was usually tidy but it never felt truly clean again, and while he was never hungry, rarely did he ever feel full either.

Eva had followed their plan, graduating with honors and running the office for SuperNova Electric without too many problems. It took Paul longer, six years, and only then did he ask her to marry him, though they had been living together in Sellwood since the first night he brought her home. How he loved her.

How I
love
her, Paul thinks, shuddering, remembering everything that has happened in the last ten years, the last twenty hours. He quickly calls the office, checks the messages, and is about to go back to his wife and newborn son when something catches his eye.

Chloe Pinter. She is pacing the hallway, cell phone to ear, her folders tucked under her armpit. She sees him too, signals for him to wait as she walks closer. He practically runs to meet her.

“No, look, I understand, I
told
Francie how important it is, and she’s coming, she’s on her way.” Chloe pauses, rolls her eyes, and mimics holding the phone away from her ear; they can both hear the yelling. “Yep, we’ll get John here too. Don’t worry, Judith. I’ve got it under control.” She snaps her phone closed and says, “Lordy, these people! How are you? We keep bumping into each other in hospitals. It’s not your vicious house cat again, is it?”

Paul realizes he has been grinning stupidly as he waited for her to hang up.

“He’s here! Eva’s amazing, he’s here, perfect, all the good bits, ten fingers and toes, lots of hair, big ol’ conehead—” He can’t stop himself. “Just amazing, really, he looks just like his mother, thank god.”

“Oh, Paul, I’m so happy for you.” She squeezes his arm in congratulations. “What are the goods? Name, stats?”

“Um…” Suddenly he feels like he has been gone too long and is desperate to get back to the room. They both laugh at his pause. “His name is Wyeth Edward, and I can’t remember how big he is. Um, small, he’s small, but long, I think he’ll be tall.” He is backing away from her, the pull to get back to his new family so overwhelming, he can barely keep himself from running.